Wednesday, January 3, 2018

Omitting Obama

Most
Clintonistas argue like Barack Obama never existed, let alone became president.

That’s
because centrists' assumptions cemented in the late 80s and early 90s, so
subsequent events have had no impact on their perceptions. According to
their worldview, any Democrat who looks dovish is automatically George McGovern
and any Democrat who is not tough on crime is Michael Dukakis.

Similar
cynicism shaped their estimation of a black man whose middle name is Hussein
becoming president in the wake of the War on Terror. To centrists, Barack Obama
was McGovern and Dukakis rolled into one. (Yes, Obama was compared to McGovern.) His winning by landslides twice in
2008 and 2012 did not inspire them to revise their worldview. To them, it
is still 1994. To them, it is always 1994.

In 2008,
Clintonistas hypocritically mocked Obama's theme of hope as naïve - forgetting that it was Bill Clinton's shtick in 1992. In a TV spot entitled
"Hope," William Jefferson
Clinton touted his boyhood meeting John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Did Hillary
Clinton’s team learn from this 2008 mistake and strike a more optimistic and
ambitious tone in 2016? Not for the most part.

Yes, they
avoided directly attacking her likeable opponent this time around. They at
least understood that strategy had spectacularly backfired last
time when they went negative against Obama. So instead, they largely farmed-out
their expressions of patronizing contempt to their surrogates.(1)

Centrist
pessimism is dispiriting as well as alienating. Clintonistas followed
Obama’s Audacity of Hope with their significantly less
inspiring resignation to low expectations. Saying that single payer will
"never,
ever come to pass" was a pretty shitty pep talk for Hillary Clinton to
give. That's not how you energize the party's base. And, as I wrote
before, “never” is not gradualism – it’s defeatism.

I have
called centrists “centrist quislings,” “covert conservatives,” and “closeted
conservatives” on many occasions, but I have not explained the dynamic which
makes them so. I think there may be an attitudinal continuum from centrism to
libertarianism to conservatism - and pessimism may be the engine that pushes things
ever rightward. In my last post, I pointed out centrists’ libertarian
tendencies. In my book, I wrote a lot about libertarianism’s “built-in
authoritarian drift.” The political philosophy is not really supposed to
cohere. Indeed, it is built with planned obsolescence. It’s a rickety bridge to
conservatism that is supposed to collapse once you reach the other side.
Conservative commentator Matt Lewis talks of the libertarian-to-alt-right
pipeline, although he do not fully acknowledge conservatism’s particular
pipe segment in it. In my book, I posit pessimism is what pumps the flow ever
rightward:

[T]his atmosphere of fear breeds an anti-libertarian attitude – even among libertarians themselves. Why? Because the basis of libertarian thought is the Enlightenment belief that people are basically rational and good and therefore require very little government to peaceably get along. But, if you think most people are ignorant or predatory, your attitude becomes authoritarian. Conservative founder John Jay wrote, “The mass of men are neither wise nor good, and virtue, like the other resources of the country, can only be drawn to a point and exerted by strong circumstances ably managed, or a strong government ably administered.”(2) As George Orwell observed, “The mental connection between pessimism and a reactionary outlook is no doubt obvious enough.”(3) Humorist Andy Rooney once ironically observed that liberals think people are basically good but need some help from their government while conservatives think people are basically bad but will be okay if they are left alone.(4) Of course, that does not stop conservatives from trying to legislate morality.

This
explains why Glenn Beck’s “libertarian” rhetoric turns authoritarian so
quickly. It’s largely in part because his vision is so dark. With this dynamic
in mind, the fact that Hillary Clinton has long belonged to creepy
right-wing prayer group should be less surprising. In 1993, she
declared that single payer was inevitable: By 2016, she declared it the
opposite of inevitable. Even if we accept the charitable interpretation that
her idealism was sapped out of her by difficult experience, a presidential
candidate without ideals is hardly, well, ideal. Trauma is not
always maturity. But trauma or no, she has a very well-feathered nest. When
you can spend $3 million on your daughter’s wedding, your credible complaints
are few. Such feather-bed pessimists tend toward conservatism sooner or
later.

And this
pessimism isn’t just about accepting conservative domination of the political
process as a law of nature or an American peculiarity. Centrists share
conservatives “skepticism” of government. That’s why they did not feel betrayed
when Bill Clinton proclaimed “The era of big government is over” in his 1996 State of the Union Address - to enthusiastic applause from a Republican Congress.

This also explains why Bernie Sanders’ supporters favor feminist legislation more strongly that
Hillary Clinton’s: It’s because child care, paid family leave, and other
proposals that would materially benefit women would also inconvenience
corporations - and centrists certainly can’t have that! Centrists are feminists
as long as it does not cost their donors anything.

Pro-woman
programs that are taken for granted in other western democracies are taken off
the table as nonstarters here. Centrists are dismissive of any ambitious government
effort to make lives easier. As Hillary Clinton said in the first primary debate
with Bernie Sanders, “We are not Denmark. I love Denmark. We are the United States of America.” What she is basically saying is: “We can’t have nice things because this
is America.”
That starkly contrasted with her empty message that “America is
already great.” Well, by this metric, we are not as great as most Scandinavian
nations - which incidentally have greater gender parity in their governments.
Look at Sweden.
Look at Iceland.
They elected their first woman presidents and prime ministers long ago and
their healthcare covers everyone.

The Onion recently ran a piece in which
puzzled historians wonder how Americans possibly could have built Hoover Dam the same
way people used to wonder how the Egyptians built the pyramids or the Celts
built Stonehenge. Whether intended or not, it was a brilliant critique of
centrist pessimism and skepticism of government. Sometimes I wonder if centrists
think the moon landings were faked. After all, it would be the logical end product
of their defeatist world view.

As I keep
saying, Obama's election should have dispelled such pessimism. Let me repeat: We
elected a black man president twice by comfortable margins and his middle name
is Hussein. And, oh yes, conservatives constantly called him a socialist. What else do I need to tell you?

I am not
arguing that Obama was not a centrist. But he at least had the good sense to
encourage rather than discourage the progressive base. The fact the he - like Bill Clinton - campaigned to the left of where he later governed is enormously
disappointing, but it also shows that is where the votes are. And that
torpedoes and sinks a central centrist conceit about the American electorate.
Centrists love to argue that America is a conservative
country. This pessimistic assessment excuses their every policy betrayal
and dog whistle triangulation.
And BONUS: their conservative cocktail party friends love to hear it.(5)

I’ve always
said that pessimism is as intellectually lazy as optimism. Both attitudes assume
human nature has an inherent unitary trajectory - and attitudes are poor substitutes for specific
instance analysis. The “realism” and “pragmatism” centrists boast is simply blind,
unthinking pessimism. It’s the superficial wisdom if imbeciles stuck in 1994 who
do not read past the headlines, so they never notice when someone has buried
the lede - which is often where the greatest harbinger of change is found.

Optimism may
be just as lazy as pessimism, but it is rarely as reactionary. And, unlike
pessimism, optimism gets out the vote. The mass appeal of big ideas over modest tweaks is something that Hillary Clinton herself belatedly admitted in a passage in her book, What Happened:

Democrats should reevaluate a lot of our assumptions about which policies are politically viable. These trends make universal programs even more appealing than we previously thought. I mean programs like Social Security and Medicare, which benefit every American, as opposed to Medicaid, food stamps, and other initiatives targeted to the poor. Targeted programs may be more efficient and progressive, and that’s why during the primaries I criticized Bernie’s “free college for all” plan as providing wasteful taxpayer-funded giveaways to rich kids. But it’s precisely because they don’t benefit everyone that targeted programs are so easily stigmatized and demagogued. ... Democrats should redouble our efforts to develop bold, creative ideas that offer broad-based benefits for the whole country.

Of course, anyone familiar with conservative strategy should already know this. It is a truism that "Social Security is the third rail in American politics" while welfare was a soft target. Also, comparative political science is a thing: Universal programs are the norm in western Europe, as anyone who says "I love Denmark" should know. That's why they have better resisted neoliberal attempts to repeal or defund them. And it cannot escape comment that Hillary Clinton mentions her own demagoguery here, oddly calling targeted programs "more efficient and progressive" when they chronically miss their targets because millions who desperately need them are not considered poor enough to qualify.

But more important here is the fact that Clinton's passage dramaticallyclashes with bedrock centrist attitudes. As Doug Henwood wrote in his review, it rejects "a generation of neoliberal orthodoxy."

Hopefully, her die hard supporters will follow her lead and reject it as well.

____________

1) In turn, they basically slandered Sanders the same way they had Obama. Both were portrayed as Messiahs to myopic misogynists and simpletons who did not understand politics. The old script only needed some slight revisions like name changes, so "Obama Boys" became "Bernie Bros." The inconvenient fact that younger women preferred Hillary's opponent in both primaries was studiously ignored when not patronizingly dismissed. Age, not sex, was the party’s primary dividing line each time.2) Gordon
S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York:
Vintage Books, 1993), 261.

3) George
Orwell, A Collection of Essays (New York: Harcourt, Inc.,
1948), 230. Interestingly, Orwell thought prosperity and despair have a
counter-intuitive relationship. Here is more of that quote:

The mental connection between pessimism and a reactionary outlook is no doubt obvious enough. What is perhaps less obvious is just why the leading writers of the ’twenties were predominantly pessimistic. Why always the sense of decadence, the skulls and cactuses, the yearning after lost faith and impossible civilizations? Was it not, after all, because these people were writing in an exceptionally comfortable epoch?

5) They
also love to hear centrists parrot their talking point that America turned
away from “big government” in the 1980s. That is their explanation as to
how Ronald Reagan got elected. Funny, you would think that Jimmy Carter’s
Iranian Hostage Crisis might have figured into their analysis. In reality,
Reagan benefited from his charisma and the economy. As I wrote before, he was
personally popular, but his policies were not. His genial demeanor created a
cognitive disconnect in voters’ minds: They could not associate pompadour
grandpa with his heartless policies. It similarly insulated him from his administration’s
constant scandals – hence the talk of his “Teflon” coating.